Citation Guide


Here is one style through which WWW sources could be cited. This style is based on the MLA style and the Columbia style , but is slightly different, adding some crucial information that these styles sometimes omit, eliminating some redundant material, and clarifying some of the elements that are confusing. More importantly, this guide attempts to explain how to find the elements that tehse styles require.

Here is the general scheme. The colors correspond to each of the three elements to any citation (author, work title, publication information), and each of the elements listed below is hyperlinked to a full description of that element:

Author lastname, firstname. "Title of Website,"Contextual site . Ed. editor firstname lastname. Publisher (mirror of: <mirror root, if applicable>), Date of publication. <URL>  Date of access.

Here is an example (of how to cite this page):

Hoffman, Eric. "Citation Guide," NWR: Tutorials. English Department at NIU, July 12, 1999. <http://www.engl.niu.edu/nwr/tutorials/webtut46.html> 12 July 1999.

And here's how to find each element:

Author:
The author's name is normally listed somewhere near the bottom of the page. Sometimes, the author name will appear near the top of the page, but this is the exception to the rule.
If you can't find an author's name, look for an editor's name (this site maintained by: X). If you find one, use the editor's name in the first position, followed by "(ed.)" without the quotes but with the parentheses.
If there are both name types listed, put the author's name in the first position, and the editor's name in the editor's position.
If there are no names at all, try to look for one in the document source. To do so, click on VIEW document source. Near the top of the HTML source, you might see something like this:
<head>
   <meta name="Author" content="Eric Hoffman">
   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.51 [en] (WinNT; I) [Netscape]">
</head>
See the part that says <meta name= "Author" . . .>? This contains information about the person who created the web site (but not necessarily the info on the page). If there is a name here, you should list it as an editor, not the author of the page.
If there are multiple authors, treat them as MLA style (two or three authors, separate each with a comma and stick with the lastname firstname protocol: for more than three authors, list the first or primary author, and then put "et al."

Punctuation:
The author element of the citation should end in a period.

Title of Web site
    This one can be a little tricky. Sometimes, the page will have a big title right on top. If so, use it as the title of the document (so the "title" of this page would be "Citation Guide").

Normally, however, pages don't give you handy little titles. If you don't find a title in the page itself, look at the very top of your Netscape or IE window (the part above the menu). On this page, the title bar will read "Citation Guide for World Wide Web Pages - Netscape". This is the STRUCTURAL title of the page. So if the page doesn't give you an internal title, use the structural one (even if that title reads "untitled"). In any cases where there is confusion concerning the existence of a title (large bold text on the top of a page does not always constitute a formal title), use the structural title of the page. NOTE -- do not include the "--Netscape" part of the title bar: just the title of the page.

Punctuation
The title element of the page should be in quotation marks, and should end in a comma if there is a contextual work section. Otherwise, this element should end in a period.

Note: DO NOT include anything like "Online" or other redundant notification. The existence of a URL in the citation tells the reader both that the source is online and that it is a hypertextual (WWW) document.

Contextual Site
Sometimes, when you find a page, you'll find that the page is a small part of a larger project. For example, this page can be cited as a stand-alone document, but it would be more accurate to include the information about this pages context. In other words, this page is part of a larger "package" or "cluster" of sites, which is the "tutorial" section of the "NWR" area of this web site. So if I were going to cite this page, I should include the larger context of which this page is part. To find that information, I would look for links on the page itself to a containing page (look for links that says "index" or "home" or anything like that.) You could also try to Backtrack the URL a bit to see if you find any other info.

Punctuation
The contextual site element should end in a period.

Editor:
The editor of the page includes anyone who updates or maintains the page other than the original author of the document. So, if you find a listing at the bottom of the page that reads: page maintained by Shelley Hoffman, then Shelley Hoffman is the editor of the site, and we would include the following element in our citation entry:
Ed. Shelley Hoffman.

Punctuation
The editor element should end with a period. Remember that if you are listing the editor in lieu of the author of the page in the first position, you leave this element blank.

Publisher:
The publisher element of the citation entry is one of the most important, because it tells us the identity of the hosting server, as well as clues about the relationship between the information and the publisher of that information. To learn more about this topic, read the following page about evaluating Internet resources.

To find the publisher of a document, you'll need to Backtrack the URL all the way to the  Domain Name. In other words, take the URL of this document:
http://www.engl.niu.edu/ceh/104/citation.html

If you backtrack this URL to the Domain Name, you'll get http://www.engl.niu.edu. When this site is browsed, you would probably conclude that the server belonged to the English Department at NIU, and you would be correct. So the publisher in this case would be The Department of English at NIU.

If the site is identified as a mirror site, you should include (mirror of: <original location URL>) in your citation. A mirror site is a server that acts as a secondary publisher of material that is identical to the information published at the original source. If a site is a mirror, this fact is normally identified somewhere on the page itself, or in the enclosing contextual layer.

Here's an example of what a citation for a mirrored site might look like:


Punctuation
The publisher element should end in a comma.

Date of Publication:
This element is pretty straightforward. Many pages list a date of publication or last update near the bottom of the page. Note that you only list the most RECENT update version.

If this information is unavailable, you can try to look either in the enclosing contextual layer, (in case this page is part of a larger project), or VIEW INFO (properties in I.E.) about the page. This INFO screen (located under the View menu in Netscape 4+) sometimes gives information about the time and date the page was last modified.

Punctuation
The date of publication element should end in a period.

URL:
Arguably the single most important piece of information in your citation entry, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address at which the information can be accessed. Typically, this step involves writing down the URL as it appears on your browser screen and typing it into the entry within angle brackets < >. Better, use COPY and PASTE to put URL's into your citations: URL syntax is exact, so if you mistype even a single character, the address will not work. Copying and Pasting solves this issue.
The tricky case involves frames. When you are looking at a framed page, the URL as displayed by your browser may not change at all, even when you look at different pages within those frames. To find the URL of a page WITHIN frames:

  1. Find the information you want
  2. RIGHT-CLICK somewhere in that frame.
  3. Either:
If you include a citation entry to a page normally accessed within frames, you should include the parent frame layer as the CONTEXTUAL SITE element in your citation.

Punctuation
The URL element should be contained within <angle brackets> and should end without punctuation.

Date of Access:
This last element gives the date of access; in other words, the date on which you viewed the aforementioned material. This element is important because many web sites have extremely limited duration. So, with this element, you are saying "On such and such day, this file with the above attributions existed at this location." This claim is empirical and verifiable through server records.

Punctuation
The date of access element should end in a period.

That's about it.

Go on for a discussion of how to create properly formatted Works Cited and bibliography pages in HTML.


 

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